


Areas of Inexperience

by gogollescent



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 20:06:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written in response to the prompt, "Jadzia persuades Kira that Dax has never slept with a Bajoran before; Kira belatedly realizes the lie."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Areas of Inexperience

“I’m not drunk,” said Kira. “I’m mellow. I know, it’s an easy mistake.”

She had her feet up on the table, and a little glass of something brandy-colored and fizzing held to her lips like a rose in the hands of a gardener. She might just have made a joke. Dax wasn’t sure which of the two observations was more damning, but she found herself wanting to believe Kira anyway, if only because the alternative was believing that Kira had to muster liquid courage just to invite Dax to her quarters. Off-duty, she was still wearing her uniform jacket, and the curve of her back was as careful as though working under strain.

“Hi to you too,” Dax said, sitting down. She looked around, not very surreptitiously. It wasn’t as sparse as she’d half-expected, but there were no ornaments, just the private shrine in one corner and enough furniture to make the place feel empty. She reprimanded herself mentally for lingering over it. It had been, what, two months? Her quarters weren’t exactly a paeon to her personality either, not least because she was still working out what that was—around the steady well of a confidence not native. Give it time, she suddenly thought, and saw Kira smile.

“It’s Risian champagne,” she said, offering the bottle to Dax along with a second glass. “Odo gave it to me. Said, and I quote, he was going to use it as evidence, but then the defendant exploded.”

Dax looked at the champagne with renewed wariness. “No connection?”

“Forensics says no,” said Kira. “I’d let you take it to the lab, but—”

“I’m really more of an astrophysicist,” murmured Dax.

“—let’s face it, half the time we don’t catch this stuff in screenings because it’s been possessed by the vengeful spirit of a Gamma Quadrant pianist and not chemical tampering anyway,” said Kira, staring into her cup. “You ever get the feeling there’s something weird about this station?” 

“I understand Julian’s going to make a full recovery,” said Dax, hiding a smile. Kira seemed younger than Dax had ever seen her. It was the alcohol, she thought, bringing out Curzon's venerable perspective; or else the soft vulnerability, the nearly-domestic strangeness that came at the tipping point. There was nowhere in the galaxy Dax would rather have been. Like lifting your eye up to a pinhole, and being pierced by light.

“When was the first time you went into space?” she asked Kira, pouring herself a shot.

Kira started. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “Eighteen? Sixteen? There was a mission—we hijacked a satellite. I didn’t get a much of a chance to admire the scenery,” she added, self-consciously, as though she expected Dax to disapprove. Dax wasn’t sure that she didn’t. She’d visited space for the first time as a child in her father’s arms aboard an observatory platform orbiting Trill, or as a grown woman attending a political conference to represent her council, depending how you looked at it. Either way, it hadn’t been to blind someone else’s army, except with eloquence in Lela’s case. She was all for violence in moderation, but she still thought of stars as somehow beyond it all: more important as an animal to be dissected than as a setting for war. She wished she could change the lens on Kira’s mind, just briefly. She would hand Kira a memory of the sky that wasn't edged with utilitarian terror.

The station might do it for her, given time. The station and the wormhole. 

“It sounds exciting.”

Kira gave her an incredulous look. Dax suppressed the thought—Curzon’s—that she’d deserved it. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s all right,” said Kira, slow and inward now. “It was a good mission. Went off perfectly. I didn’t leave Bajor again until… years later. And then it was always here, Terok Nor. It seems so different now.”

“Just imagine,” said Dax. “All those years, the Cardassians were tramping around up here, acting the conquerors, and they never once realized what— _who_ —was looking over their shoulders.”

“I wish they had,” said Kira, emptying her glass. She refilled it, her hands trembling with what Dax thought was more likely to be anger than inebriation. Unless that was wishful thinking. She really wanted to kiss her. You didn’t do that to people trembling-drunk. “I wish—”

“Nerys,” said Dax, and caught her wrist halfway up from the table. Kira didn’t flinch. She put the glass down and met Dax’s gaze, her eyes unreadable. Dax experienced a pang of envy for her eyebrows: such thin strokes. She could feel Kira’s pulse beneath her hand.

“All right,” said Kira, pushing the drink aside. She turned until her knees were almost touching Dax’s, and tried to smile. “What about you? Starfleet officer, three hundred years old—I bet you were eensy, the first time you left atmosphere.”

“Something like that,” said Dax, amused. “We all have our areas of inexperience.”

Something in Kira’s posture communicated doubt as clearly as though signposted. It did so  _all the time_. One got used to it, but on occasion it drew attention to itself. "After eight lifetimes?”

“Sure,” said Dax, voice lower than she’d meant it to come out. She saw Kira react, and lean forward, not away. Dax decided to consult the feelings of the champagne on this one. “I’ve never kissed a Bajoran before, for example.”

Kira made a face. “That was… awful.”

“I know,” Dax agreed. “Eight lifetimes  _wasted._ ”

“You’re the one I suspect is—”

“I had one glass. Indulge me?”

Kira hesitated. “I should—”

“Come on, Nerys,” said Dax. “You invited me over, didn’t you? I don’t think you called me so that we could play drinking games about our colorful pasts. I bet,” and she shifted her grip to clasp Kira’s hand, “you don’t even own any good rulebooks.”

“As in, two shots for every life taken in the service of freedom?”

“Kiss me,” said Dax.

Kira did. It was a slow, open-mouthed accessing of her dry lips, with Kira’s hand after a moment finding its way under her hair to cup her neck. They remained upright for the first minute, and then Dax pressed them over and down onto the couch, Kira bending backwards under her. She was surprisingly easy in capitulation, grabbing Dax’s arms and pulling her full weight onto herself with no more than a rough sigh; there was a scramble of elbows before Dax managed to brace her hand against the gap in the cushions, and then wet silence, and a little tongue. Kira’s knee bore up against the inside of her thigh with unobjectionable force. 

“You know, I’ve never slept with a Bajoran either,” Dax said. 

“Thank you for clarifying,” said Kira, kissing her throat. 

“I… wouldn’t want you to think I was the kind of person who went to bed with new species without tenderly embracing them first,” said Dax. It had been a really bad pickup line. She felt an obscure need to probe Kira’s apparent receptivity to it, although that was decreasing with every opened button of her shirt. 

Kira’s fingers fanned up the sides of her ribs, sliding under cloth. “Jadzia,” she said, “shut up.” Dax tried for a little more friction through her pants with Kira’s bony patella, and Kira dropped her leg. “These lips are zipped,” said Dax.

“Wonderful,” muttered Kira; but she brought the knee back. Dax, grateful, reached for a boob.

It was probably her rapt expression that was her ultimate downfall. Kira rose off the cushions to provide fastening-reach on her jacket, stopped mid-twist, and narrowed her eyes.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I know that look. That was the look you gave me last week—when you told me about how Curzon and the exiled Vedek Marit once had a hot date and that if she hadn’t been a nun on the run with breath like a Betazed marsh he would have seen a long future with her!”

“I think I said bog,” said Dax.

Kira pushed her off the couch. She went down painfully, thanks to an accidental intersection with the coffee table, but was consoled by Kira landing on top of her a second later; also by Kira sitting up to straddle her hips. “What was Vedek Marit’s planet of origin, Lieutenant?”

“Are we roleplaying now?” said Dax hopefully. “I could go for roleplay.”

Kira held a threatening hand over her buttons. Dax winced. “Bajor! I’m sorry, Nerys, but do you really expect me to believe you fell for the never-in-eight-lifetimes bit? You gave me a booty call!”

Kira looked guilty. “Yes,” she said, “but you got here before I could—and then we started talking. I mean, I was a little confused.”

“So you were relying on me being totally truthful about my motives to clear things up?” said Dax. 

“Yes!” said Kira. “No. I can’t believe you went with  _never kissed a Bajoran._ ”

“It was where the conversation took us!”

“You could have said, I’ve never kissed a terrorist,” said Kira. “Or a backwards provincial militant.”

“And those would have worked?”

“They would have been honest,” said Kira, frowning. “Also, to be frank, yes. I need to get laid.”

Not for the first time, Dax wondered just how many liberties the Universal Translator actually took. In this case she would accept what she was given. “Then,” she said smoothly, “you’ll be pleased to know I really haven’t slept with a terrorist.” She would have expanded on her tragic ignorance of warrior women and guerilla fighters at large, but then Kira might've remembered about the Klingon Empire.

Kira seemed to have other things on her mind.

“You haven't slept with a terrorist, _yet_ ,” she said, descending. 


End file.
